Have other cafes with wireless been approached by the police?
Do the police really expect citizens to spy on their neighbors at Internet cafes and public spaces?
Can the police or others check the Internet records of a cafe or other public space with wireless?
Who do they need to get permission from. The cafe? The Internet service?
What are the ways that individuals using wireless in public spaces can protect themselves from spyware?
Is this story Tea Lounge specific, Park Slope specific, or city-wide?
first off, don’t use a public access point for anything that is private. Don’t use it to do anything that you wouldn’t print out and leave on a table at a public library. Unless, that is, that you have the ability to connect to a VPN that you trust… maybe through work or through a pay VPN service. A VPN (Virtual Private Network) connection will heavily encrypt all your network traffic. This is the only way to be very reasonable (although not entirely) sure that you are not being spied upon.
As an example of what can happen in a public network, I once opened my laptop for a moment in Gorilla Coffee to check my email. In the background an FTP process that I had running when I closed my laptop reconnected to the host of my website that it had been accessing automatically. FTP is not a secure protocall so the login and pass were sent in clear text.
The next day I noticed that my website’s access logs had tons of odd requests. I tried to login but couldn’t. Someone had changed my administrator’s password and given it out, and dozens of people were trading files from my server. They had uploaded 20GB of pirated software and pornography in one day. I locked everything down again quickly.
But this is the point: there was someone actively monitoring all traffic on that network — not trying to get to me specifically, but looking at everything and harvesting useful information to sell or exploit.
If you check your POP/IMAP mail or your gmail at a place like this someone could be grabbing it all, looking for logins and passwords, credit card accounts, etc. Most financial services provide encryption, but you are relying on technology that you don’t understand to protect yourself.